neurological dryer lint

so i have yet to discover the magic of os x, after nearly a month of use. much of my time has been spent locating applications that'd allow me to do the stuff i do everyday in windows - an ftp client, a messaging app, and the like. i'm still exploring, playing with different apps to find ones that cover all the bases.

my conclusions, after a month:

it definitely looks sharper than windows. the quartz rendering engine may be the single most impressive thing this os has going for it - but that's not really saying much if you don't give a crap about eye candy. fortunately for apple, i have a slight weakness there. but definitely not enough of one to force me to switch full time. vista may improve things there (beta 2, which i tried a few days ago, certainly didn't knock me off my feet), but for now os x has the upper hand. you don't pay attention to it very much in windows.

there's not enough i can do with the keyboard. now i have a definite bias because i started out on the command line when i was just a wee lad. here's the difference, though - windows gives you the option. you can do plenty with the command line in windows, and if it tickles your fancy you can do everything with the mouse. os x does not follow suit. they could do it rather easily - but they don't. way too much interaction with the mouse is necessary.

it boots up rather fast - but windows is still faster on the same hardware. windows outruns os x in almost every application.

i enjoy the unix integration, but as of yet i haven't seen much benefit. were i using this box as a server, i'd be all over it. i can't get ports working yet, either, so it's not as easy installing the small chunk of unix apps i want to use - wget, pine/pico, etc.

support: well so far the hardware is fast but flaky. still trying to convince apple that their wireless driver is jacked up. you'd think the piles of people complaining about the issue in their forums would help convince them. as a tech support vet i realize they have to assume that i'm clueless and go through a clearly defined process to rule out human error - but after four calls i'm still stuck with an unstable wireless connection. they've been mostly friendly so far, as good or better than the PC OEM support groups i've dealt with in the past.

i'm also still sorely missing full driver support for windows on this device. i doubt apple will provide better drivers than the barely adequate ones they've produced so far. i further doubt that microsoft will step up and provide an isight driver or a more capable trackpad driver.

the last significant issue is support for my deskjet 3740 printer. i chuckled at this: HP provides a driver for the printer that works if i plug it directly into the macbook. i have it plugged into my windows desktop machine, though, shared out to the network. and guess what? the same driver doesn't work to control a shared printer. brilliant.

i've been using firefox 95% of the time - there's not too vast a difference between it, safari (the built-in browser) and camino (the os x-specific version of mozilla), except that only firefox has easy keyboard shortcuts to use the search bar and to jump between open tabs.

so while i toy around in os x occasionally i find myself spending most of my time in windows. i've gotten used to os x, i feel fairly comfortable in it, but i don't see enough benefit to using it over windows to convince me to switch.

there's an article in pc magazine concerning this topic. while i haven't spent a lot of time with networked services between my desktop PC and this system (besides the aforementioned dancing with printer drivers), but i can see the author's frustration at trying to maintain a connection to his NAS box.

i'm a little disappointed. just another OS - nothing special. i am thrilled at the hardware, though - easily the best laptop i've ever used, and i can't recommend it enough. it'll get the road test next week while we're in hilton head.